It should come as no surprise that the late nineteenth century was not a very good time to be a black person in the United States, but apparently the state of Louisiana did not feel that things were bad enough. In 1890 the state legislature passed a new law requiring the railroads to have separate passenger cars for whites and blacks for reasons that can only be described as super racist. Unsurprisingly, this new law pissed off the civil rights activists of the time. More surprising was the fact that it also pissed off the various railroad companies that operated in Louisiana. No, not because the railroad owners loved the idea of justice and equality, but because having to keep everyone separate would require more passenger cars which would cut into their profits. The two groups got together and what resulted was one of the strangest combinations of greed and social justice in American history.
The activists and the railroads, working together, came up with a convoluted plot to force the challenging of the law in the court system. The plot involved having a stooge get arrested for sitting in the whites only passenger car. The stooge they picked was a man by the name of Homer. Homer was a middle class shoe maker who was a bit of a strange pick given that in his photo he resembles a long lost son of President Garfield's. However, despite his outward appearance, Homer was 1/8 black, which made him more than enough black for the people of the time to treat like shit. Being 1/8th black made Homer, in the old timey racist speak of the time, a quadroon, which would have been a great name for a store bought cookie, you know, if it wasn't already a super racist term.
Homer, on a hot summer day purchased a train ticket, climbed aboard the white's only rail car, which nobody batted an eye at because again he looked like James Garfield’s progeny, and then promptly told the conductor that he was 1/8 black. The conductor, not letting appearances get in the way of his racism, freaked the fuck out and tried to throw Homer out of the car, which resulted in what the newspapers of the time called a severe altercation. Luckily for all involved, there was a private investigator on board the train, who had also been hired by the railroad, who promptly arrested Homer for breaking the law, because that was something private investigators could do back then. From there, the plan went along swimmingly. Homer's case, defended by railroad funded lawyers, worked its way through the legal system until finally reaching the U.S. Supreme Court four years later.
The arguments before the Supreme Court were viewed as rather elementary by both sides. On Homer's side the argument was that the law was stupid and racist. On the state of Louisiana’s side, the argument was that god wanted Louisiana to keep whites and blacks from mixing, which was pretty difficult to prove given that god could not be called upon to testify. Despite this, in the end the Supreme Court, which was entirely made up of old frumpy white men, found in a 7-1 decision that the Louisiana law was about public policy, not racism, and that it was A-Okay as long as the passenger cars for the two groups were relatively the same. This decision opened the door for 68 years of super racist Jim Crow laws, which made things decidedly worse for blacks in the United States, and less importantly, hurt the railroads’ profit margins. So yeah, it was all pretty fucked up.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Homerplessy02.jpg